1. Field of the Invention
This invention generally relates to managing web content; and more specifically, to document handling in a web application.
2. Background Art
Over the last several years, the amount of information available over the World Wide Web has grown enormously, and indeed, many individual web sites now provide a vast amount of information. As a result, for many web sites, updating the information available at the site and managing the presentation of that information have become very complex, time consuming and difficult tasks.
Lotus Notes is one application that is often used very successfully to manage web content. Lotus Notes does this by organizing web content into documents, which can then be modified, updated and presented in various way. Other applications, such as a DB2/WebSphere application, may also be used to manage the content of a web site, particularly those having very large amounts of data. There are, however, some difficulties or problems with these other applications.
One problem is that some attractive features of Lotus Notes document handling are not readily available in an implementation based on a relational database as the datastore (for example a DB2/WebSphere application). This includes the ability to handle heterogeneous data content, and the ability to restrict read or edit access to the document by user or group.
Another problem is that the same application may want to present several types of documents, and the definition of these documents may change over time (an existing document type may change its content definition, or a new document type may be added). It is very expensive to redeploy a change in database or application design each time this happens.
In a similar way, security definitions may change over time. It is a problem if these changes require changes to code or database design.
Some of the fields in a document may represent selections from a predetermined set of values (these types of fields are sometimes referred to as keywords or codes). However, the choice of selections may vary over time, and introduction of a new document type may introduce an entirely new set of keyword fields. Again, there is a problem if the application needs to be redeployed each time a keyword selection changes.